Stanford's SALT Lab mapped 2,283 Y Combinator company descriptions against preference data from 1,500 workers spanning 104 occupations. Forty-one percent of company-task mappings landed where workers either resist delegation outright or see it as neither desirable nor feasible.
Workers want more human agency than the investment thesis assumes. The occupations most eager for automation account for just 1.26% of actual AI usage.
Infrastructure is hard to renegotiate once it's set. If the ecosystem is building around technical tractability rather than actual demand, the correction gets more expensive every quarter it compounds.